Affective States and Virtual Reality to Improve Gait Rehabilitation: A Preliminary Study

Jafet Rodriguez, Carolina Del-Valle-Soto and Javier Gonzalez-Sanchez
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Jafet Rodriguez: Universidad Panamericana, Facultad de Ingeniería, Álvaro del Portillo 49, Zapopan 45010, Jalisco, Mexico
Carolina Del-Valle-Soto: Universidad Panamericana, Facultad de Ingeniería, Álvaro del Portillo 49, Zapopan 45010, Jalisco, Mexico
Javier Gonzalez-Sanchez: School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University, 699 S Mill Ave, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 15, 1-14

Abstract: Over seven million people suffer from an impairment in Mexico; 64.1% are gait-related, and 36.2% are children aged 0 to 14 years. Furthermore, many suffer from neurological disorders, which limits their verbal skills to provide accurate feedback. Robot-assisted gait therapy has shown significant benefits, but the users must make an active effort to accomplish muscular memory, which usually is only around 30% of the time. Moreover, during therapy, the patients’ affective state is mostly unsatisfied, wide-awake, and powerless. This paper proposes a method for increasing the efficiency by combining affective data from an Emotiv Insight, an Oculus Go headset displaying an immersive interaction, and a feedback system. Our preliminary study had eight patients during therapy and eight students analyzing the footage using the self-assessment Manikin. It showed that it is possible to use an EEG headset and identify the affective state with a weighted average precision of 97.5%, recall of 87.9%, and F1-score of 92.3% in general. Furthermore, using a VR device could boost efficiency by 16% more. In conclusion, this method allows providing feedback to the therapist in real-time even if the patient is non-verbal and has a limited amount of facial and body expressions.

Keywords: virtual reality; EEG; BCI; HCI; gait; rehabilitation; affective state; robot-assisted (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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